The Effective Marketer

As marketers is our job to create meaningful content that will help influence sales. You will eventually find yourself not only writing copy for an eBook, whitepaper or email campaign but also having to create and deliver presentations. That’s where you can shine. Let me explain.

The Suckiness Factor

Most presentations suck. That’s a fact of life and I think that there are people with genetic predisposition to put together boring presentations. No matter how hard they try, people will not be enticed  by new bullet colors and the almost funny jokes.

Think back to the past few presentations you’ve attended. Either from other departments in your company or even delivered via webinar. Now score them according to the “suckiness factor” below:

• Zero: Outstanding presentation, didn’t feel the time go by.
• One: Good presentation, I’ve learned something today.
• Two: Meh, I’ve seen better.
• Three: What time is it? Wake me up when it’s over.
• Four: Ugh! All those bullet points are giving me headaches.
• Five: Stop! Please make it stop! I can’t take it anymore!

Creating Quality Presentations

The goal of understanding which presentations suck and why, is so that you can avoid the same mistakes when creating yours. Whether you will deliver them yourself or you are creating them for a sales pitch, a demo, conference, or any other event the important thing is to make sure your presentation won’t suck!

The first thing you should do is watch Garr Reynolds explaining how to create great presentations at this Google Talk recorded session (video embedded below).

After you’ve watched the video above, go buy his book, Presentation Zen. It’s an easy read that can take your current presentation and improve it 10x. I’m not kidding.